Breaking news: The EPA just proposed a rule to restore Clean Water Act protections to 49,000 miles of waterways across Pennsylvania.

Dear Jean,

Brandywine Creek. The Wissahickon. Neshaminy. Nine Mile Run.

What do all these streams have in common? Every single one of them is unprotected under the Clean Water Act.

Today, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a rule to restore Clean Water Act protections to hundreds of Pennsylvania waterways and wetlands and the 8 million Pennsylvanians who get their drinking water from these sources.

As big as this is, we haven’t won yet. In fact, the most important piece of the fight has just begun. The EPA is asking for public input on their plan in the next few months, and the nation’s biggest polluters are already lining up to stop it in its tracks.

Polluters who have benefited from these loopholes for years are fighting back. Big Ag is saying this rulemaking is cause for “battle,”[1] and last time the EPA took a step half this big, ExxonMobil threatened “legal warfare.”[2]

That’s why I’m contacting you now — to make sure we can send 30,000 messages from Pennsylvanians to the EPA so they hear loud and clear that we are serious about clean water.

Nobody should be allowed to treat our waterways like their personal sewer.

For more than a decade, PennEnvironment has worked to close loopholes in the Clean Water Act that have left nearly half of Pennsylvania’s’ streams and many acres of wetlands at risk of unchecked pollution. These waterways are critical–they feed and filter our drinking water sources and are some of our favorite places to swim, boat and fish.

Today’s announcement comes on the heels of hundreds of thousands of messages sent from people like you asking the Obama administration to act. Over the past three years, along with our sister organizations across the country, we’ve had more than 1 million conversations with everyday people about protecting our waterways, and we’ve built a coalition of more than 400 local elected officials, 300 small farmers, and 300 small business owners to stand with us and call on the EPA to act.